Inflection class interactions and valency changes in Matlatzinca

Overview & Synopsis

In this paper, we explore how changes in the inflection class membership of verbs in Matlatzinca (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean, Mexico) lead to changes in both their valency and meaning. In Matlatzinca, verbs often exhibit multiple class membership so that a given verb may be inflected as transitive in one class but as intransitive in another. For instance, the verb CHUN+TA, when inflected in different classes, can encompass diverse meanings: the action of ‘waking someone up’; the result state of ‘being awake’; and the spontaneous event of ‘waking up’. This linguistic phenomenon is intriguing from both a typological and a theoretical perspective as it challenges our understanding of lexical representation by prompting the question of whether these meanings represent distinct lexical entries or various construals of the same verb (Spencer 2013).